Posted
by
timothyon Sunday April 05, 2009 @01:33AM
from the transmitting-a-message-of-sorts dept.

Mad Ivan writes "The BBC has just reported that North Korea has launched a long-range rocket, which they say is a communications satellite, but that the US and Japan fear may actually be a ballistic missile. Details are still arriving; the rocket passed over northern Japan on its way up."

Well, for the past two to three weeks, I've heard nothing but "this is a missile". Maybe it's because I'm in Japan and watching Japanese news. The biggest concern that Japan had (or atleast presented to the public) is that the North Koreans suck at making rockets and there was a big chance that it would fall and hit the northern part of Japan.

There were threats back and forth "If it comes near us we'll shoot it down""Shoot it down and next time we'll aim FOR you""We'll shoot it down no matter what""We're readying bombers to bomb you if you do"

To the person wanting coverage, what they've been saying on the news is that they're looking for where it fell so they can pull it up and make sure it was a communications satellite.

You know, it _doesn't matter_ if this launch was for a communications satellite. Just because this rocket contained a benign payload, doesn't mean the next one will. North Korea doesn't have the spare money to spend on building their own satellite launching systems when it's so much cheaper to buy a satellite launch from someone else. The next payload will be whatever North Korea decides to put in the rocket, and the expertise from peaceful rockets is amazingly useful for building missiles.

should be accused and consistently vilified over their "luxury" expenses at the cost of their own people it is North Korea. There never seemed to be and end to the bellyaching over India launching satellites as people pointed to all the people living in poverty there. Yet the only concern here seems to be that they now have a long range rocket and it might hit a civilized country. I guess we are so over the fact we can't do anything about North Korea that we totally ignore the people that live there.

Right now we're concerned that the people of North Korea are going to become a danger to the rest of us, in the same way that the people of Germany and Japan became dangerous - it doesn't matter if you pick up a gun and fight or not, if you're not working against a war, you're supporting it just by going about your business back home. Same goes for the citizens of the USA right now, of course... So it's all a bunch of flag-waving bullshit - except that N.K. is the only country that much of the world believe

You cold not be more right.You probably already know this, but the situation in North Korea is sohorrible that the average north korean male is 5.9cm shorter thanthe average south korean male, due to chronic famine.http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/dec/05/northkorea [guardian.co.uk] The government, instead of fighting of famine (or simply accepting theforeign help), tries to stimulate people's growth with gymnastics(this isn't present in the link above; I read it on a newspaper anddon't have a link right now).

It might help to keep in mind that while the Russians were more organized and had more power, they were sane. We're not facing mutually assured destruction, but North Korea would be more likely to nuke SOMEONE than the USSR.

You know, back in the cold war days there was a lot of rhetoric about what the russians could do, were likely to do and wanted to do. But it turned out that much of it was fear mongering by the military industrial complex in our own countries that stood to make massive gains selling us weapons to counter that stuff.

I do not understand why this was moderated "troll". It should have been moderated "insightful". It is a very perceptive comment. Those of us who grew up during the Cold War faced the very real possibility of a large scale nuclear attack every day. Today's threats, while very real, are minor compared to the threat of 30,000 nuclear warheads raining down on your country.

They amount to the same thing. Anything that can launch a satellite can also send a warhead to another continent. ICBM's can launch payloads into orbit. In either case there's no doubt it is a military project. This is because North Korea spends more than 90% of the little they have on military related projects.

Multiple wrongs do not make a right, and you can't undo history. Putting effective ICBMs in the hands of someone like Kim Jong Il is insanely irresponsible.

The childish "you do it, so can I can too" approach you're taking is precisely that: indicative of a severely socially maladjusted person with no grasp of the severity of this situation. Let me take a quote from your post and modify it to suite this situation: until you've got better than a third grade education in these matters, shut the fuck up.

Most nuclear powers don't let hundreds of thousands of people starve to death every year so that they can fund their military. For comparison purposes, the US spends around 4% of their GDP on their military. The DPRK? 30%.

Most nuclear powers don't brainwash their people and shut out the entire outside world to maintain an iron grip on the populace.

Most nuclear powers don't keep on the brink of war at all times and use threats to extract aid.

But yeah, sure, it's not PC to say that some countries are better than others. I guess you'd be happy to move to Sudan or the DRC. After all, France or India couldn't possibly be any better.

A friend pointed me to this site [www.vbs.tv], (possibly NSFW depending on certain links) which has a couple of people going inside North Korea to shoot video. What they shoot is not concentration camps. It's not executions. It's not poverty (strictly speaking). It's just the completely bizarre world that is North Korea. I wish I could describe it, but my words just wouldn't do it justice.

* Keep on the brink of war at all times:Dick Cheyney claimed that the War on Terror could go on "indefinitely".Check.

As for your 4% figure, you have to include the military related R&D spending of all companies in the military industry, such as GE, General Dynamics, Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, Lockheed-Martin and a bunch of others. Just because the US has privatized large parts of its military doesn't mean you can arbitrarily exclude them from the military spending figure. If you include all of these then you'll come to a hell of a lot more than 4%.

Oh, and if you think that you can point to a bunch of government policies and conclude that your country is "better" than another, then the cultural attitude that you represent automatically, in my eyes, makes you worse than just about everyone else.

I was referring to the mythical ones that Rumsfeld kept crowing about in the UN. The ones that nobody believed existed because even the UN inspectors testified that, not only were they of the belief that they did not exist, but that Iraq did not have the capability to even manufacture them.

But I'm guessing that you knew what I was referring to, but were deliberately misdirecting towards facts that suit your pre-conceived view of the world.

We knew they had weapons of mass destruction because we sold them to them - Saddam got Sarin gas from the USA. We also knew that they no longer had weapons of mass destruction because we sold them to them - and we knew the Sarin gas was expired. The ONLY WMD evidence found when we went in was some shells which had traces indicating they once held Sarin. Your comment is utterly devoid of value.

Funny considering you're the only country who has actually used them in a war.

Which has absolutely nothing to do with how likely we are to use them now.

And I doubt you'd hesitate once vs russia or china if they attacked first.

That's kind of the point of MAD. You don't think Russia or China (or the USA) hasn't used them lately, because of some warm-fuzzy humanitarian reason, do you?

Nothing say north korea will attack first either [...]

Of course not. But, most people would agree that they are more likely (no matter how small that probability may be) to launch a first strike than the US, Russia, or China. They are a relatively small, backward, unstable, and unpredictable nation. They simply have less to lose.

Actually, to further your point, the DPRK has a lot more to lose should their iron-clad grip on a starving, crushed population begin to loosen. They're likely to blame such an occurrence on Western influence, and resort to rather irrational acts.

And there you have it. This is not about North Korea using such weapons offensively against others. The Korean peninsula is in permanent stalemate, because North Korea cannot attack the South without being completely defeated, and the South cannot attack the North without losing Seoul to massed artillery.

The two Koreas actually agree on one thing. Neither wants the North Korean state to fail, because that means a few million North Koreans appearing in Seoul in the first couple of days looking for something

I'll support us destroying our nuclear stockpile just as soon as I have 100% assurance that the rest of the nuclear-equipped nations are doing the same, simultaneously.

Obviously, this is never going to work. The cat is already out of the bag, so to speak. What's important now is determining the likelihood that an aggressive nation bent on insane policy will use nuclear weapons on their neighbors... oh, wait, that seems to describe North Korea.

Every year that nuclear weapons exist there is a certain chance that someone uses them and triggers the apocalypse. I don't know what that chance is. But even if it's very low, given enough time it is certain to happen! Bear in mind that nuclear war has almost started on several occasions, including by accident [wikipedia.org]. We cannot survive this situation forever.

Right, the US is running around making sweeping genocidal threats. You're living in a fantasy land. How's the view from there? Whenever you're ready to join the world of the sane, let me know. I'll have your meds ready for you, kid.

Yeah, I understand that it's much easier to decide what they should do before they have nuclear weapons and long distance missiles since they are so technically inferior to someone like the US so playing "clean" they would get owned immediately, but as soon as they have nukes it all fails since you don't want to play with nukes.

So solving it before then makes sense.

Anyway, lots of countries have nukes and eventually behave badly thanks to the extra insurance they give them. Imho you can't demand others shou

Again with this inane "he did it he did it" crap. Can you not get it through your thick head that we're dealing with a nation with openly expressed nuclear ambitions, the very same nation that operates one of the most oppressive regimes on the planet? If you think life in North Korea even remotely resembles life in the U.S., I'll gladly buy you a one way plane ticket to Pyongyang. Good riddance.

Glad you admitted you have absolutely no idea what it's like to live in the United States. Yes, we have serious problems in our government. All governments have serious issues. It's the nature of government, period.

If you are seriously attempting to compare everyday life in the U.S. to North Korea, you're completely out of your mind. I can write an opinion piece to the Atlanta Journal & Constitution declaring the President to be a bumbling buffoon, calling every Senator in Washington a bunch of dirty names, and expressing the opinion that Georgia's governor has terrible taste in suits. I run zero risk of being arrested for these acts.

Such behavior would most likely get me tortured to death in North Korea at worst, or locked up for ten years and "made an example of" at best.

The countries which already have them aren't ruled by a fascist megalomaniacal dictator, at odds with nearly every government in the world and keeping his own people in slavery.
I'm not defending the possession of ICBMs, just suggesting that if there is one nation that should be kept from having them, North Korea is probably it.

There was never anything we could do about North Korea. The amount of military might required to take down North Korea is much larger than the amount we used to take down Iraq.

We would have to have a draft.

Plus there are a few other little problems:1. Seoul is within conventional artillery range of the DMZ. Think tens or hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties. Within the first hour.2. What would China do? They view North Korea as an extension of China. That's why we didn't take North Korea in t

north korea is supported by external donations, and power held by less than two dozen key men. the amount of might "to take it down" would be very small indeed. then let the 600,000+ soldiers on the border sit for orders that never come.

North Korea doesn't even need nukes to cause major economic damage to the West. All it has to do is start shelling Seoul and that would cause immense economic chaos in hours as the manufacturing supply chain for a lot of goods worldwide is cut.

Also, DPRK doesn't have to have a high tech delivery system to do damage with a nuclear vice. There are a lot of terrorist groups who would pay high dollars for a fully functioning bomb, and they would do the rest of the work.

Sorry, I'm confused. How exactly do 500,000 men stop approximately 6000 artillery pieces from hitting a target the size of a city when they're already loaded, aimed, ready to fire and hiding in heavily fortified positions?

If North Korea decided to shell Seoul, nothing short of a pre-emptive nuke will stop them - and frankly, I'd expect a few guns to fire on Seoul even then.

Antiquated hardware? Even 100 years ago artillery was more than capable of hitting something the size of Seoul. North Korea hasn't exact

As if china would be much better? Or the religious morons in the middle-east?

But yeah, fuck him while you can then.

But as I said in another post UN is useless thanks to the veto countries, back then I was thinking about them asking north korea to do anything at all when UN can't do shit vs other countries such as the USA. But in this case UN would never decide that north korea should be attacked either thanks to China (which is a veto country in UN isn't it?)

The governments of the US and europe let me down more than they should, but they have a long way to go before they scare me as much as north Korea's government. I mean, I'd trust both Iran and Cuba with nukes before North Korea. Iran and Cuba seem to understand that building an atomic bomb is something you do so that you don't have to use it. North Korea on the other hand seems more likely to use it than not use it.

Whatever it's about environment, peoples rights, weapons or whatever the same rules apply: Clean up in your own backyard or shut the fuck up!

Rational thinking like that has very little use in real-world international politics, and none in dealings with north korea.

It seems like you're suggesting that it's unfair that we have nukes and they don't. I suggest you go downtown, give an angry crazy homeless man one loaded gun and you keep another. By your theory, everyone is equal and everything should work out great over multiple tests. You can tell me how it went on monday.

IMHO the West really has no business telling the rest of the world that they can't have nukes while the West still has them - this doesn't mean that we should give everyone nukes, it means we should damned well disarm to put everyone on an equal footing.

Super idea. Lets all give up nukes, and go back to the days when war between major powers is again thinkable.

The parent's probably not trolling, this is a common sentiment among citizens of non-nuclear nations. Leaders in countries like Iran and North Korea simply exploit it for popular support. There's no strategic rationale for them to build a nuclear bomb, but the debate rallies their citizens around a nationalist issue.

"In a statement, Obama said the launch was "a clear violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1718, which expressly prohibits North Korea from conducting ballistic missile-related activities of any kind."

As if this regime needed to be any more creative to continue their quest to piss off the world. Yeah, U.N. sanctions don't really mean a whole lot these days (did they ever?), but this is ridiculous.

Honestly, if I thought for one moment that North Korea actually had peaceful space exploration motives in mind, about 50% of my objection to this would vanish instantly. As it stands, the regime is run by a madman with serious nuclear ambitions, something people tend to forget about.

Personally, I wish we'd dealt wish North Korea a long, long time ago... perhaps in place of Iraq. I'm certainly no foreign policy expert, but I have served in the military, and I've always considered North Korea a much larger looming threat to regional and global security than Iraq ever was (with the exception of the Gulf War, that is).

That point is often forgot. The purpose of the UN is communication. I have little respect or tolerance for the UN as it exists today, because of their evident desire to overreach their purpose. Still, I would hate for the UN to go away. It should have no power, though, besides the ability to assist member nations to conduct diplomacy.

The problem is there isn't a good way to deal with North Korea. They have a massive army, a very fearful and xenophobic populace, and tons of weapons trained on South Korea. So you have two scenarios, neither of which is really acceptable:

1) Conventional attack. You send in large numbers of conventional forces to destroy their army and occupy the country. This would work, but at the first sign of invasion, North Korea will fire their artillery trained on the south. This features lovely things like poison gas warheads and such and easily reaches major cities. There is going to be a large loss of civilian life and infrastructure in South Korea because of this. There is also likely to be fairly heavy casualties in the invading military force. While North Korea's military isn't technology advanced, it is very large.

2) Nuclear attack. You target nuclear tipped cruise missiles, bombs, and perhaps even some ICBMs at all military targets of any note. The idea is a single coordinated massive strike that simply eliminates all their counterforce capability. Perhaps large population centres are targeted as well. Ok well ignoring the whole problem with world opinion on WMDs, you have the problem that this will cause a massive loss of life in the north that is not limited to, or even primarily, military. There's then all the problems with fallout, lingering radiation and all that other nasty shit as seen in Japan in WWII and Russia when Chernobyl blew up. You could potentially (though no guarantee) eliminate the threat to the south in one swoop and crush the north's military, but at what cost?

Thus far there just isn't a good suggestion for how you'd deal with North Korea and not have it lead to massive loss of civilian life on one or both sides. Thus it isn't a situation anyone wants to get in to. There's also the question of how China would react. While they don't seem to be so happy with North Korea any more, they do still support them. Let's not forget that is where North Korea's military support came for in the Korean War.

All in all there doesn't seem to be a good answer, so it is just kind of left alone.

you have the problem that this will cause a massive loss of life in the north that is not limited to, or even primarily, military.

You're right, there's no good answer, and there hasn't been one for a long time (since my grandfather served as a Marine in Korea, in fact). That said, I see the North Korean people as faced with two choices:

Depose their maniacal dictator and deal with the resulting upheaval in their society (considerable misery for their people).

Accept a severe and devastating response from whatever nuclear-capable nation finally gets fed up with the threats and posturing from North Korean leadership.

And it is exactly this kind of stupid dichotomy ("we must fight or die!") thinking that pushes countries to war.

There are actually other, peaceful, solutions to this. E.g. NK was actually starting economical reforms much like China did in the early '80s, with special economic regions near the border, until the new president (the "CEO president") of South Korea took the hard-line approach to the North, which, unsurprisingly resulted in similar stance from the NK.

Had NK been allowed to continue their economic reforms, there could be hope that it will eventually be more open much like China did without any wars breaking out.

By forcing your opponent to either fight or curl up and die, don't be surprised when you got a fight in your hands. Although it may be a hopeless fight for your opponent, remember that you are the one taking all the hope from him in the first place.

Even the Art of War said always leave a way out for your opponents, you don't want to force him into a "fight or die" situation, because that's when he will fight most fiercely against you.

3) Coup d'etat. Replace the paranoid, militaristic North Korean regime with a new government—possibly one backed by the United States or her allies. Since the North Korean population is unlikely to do this on their own initiative, they will need some assistance and logistical support from another world power. Another country could theoretically encourage a "friendly" general to seize power and then back him up militarily, politically, and economically when he does so. The U.S. has a long history of supporting anti-Communist coups via the Truman Doctrine [wikipedia.org], and we have even backed totalitarian dictatorships—so long as they weren't Communist.

A successfully executed coup could be relatively bloodless, would leave North Korea's infrastructure and population centers (such as they are) intact, and would certainly cost less money and manpower than a full-scale invasion. However, the outcome is entirely dependent on luck: military leaders might succeed in launching a WMD attack on South Korea before they are deposed, the new government might not be sustainable, or the coup might be a complete and utter failure. Additionally, U.S. involvement would require our intelligence agencies to demonstrate actual competence, and a U.S.-backed coup could seriously impact our relations with China. Still, I think a coup would be a better option than a full-scale attack.

I for one cannot believe that the great powers, China in particular, continue to let this little pissant live.

It's all about perspective. Keep in mind that some of our foreign policy opponents say the same thing about the US and Israel. The two aren't similar in many ways, but they both do provoke in ways that serve some of the interests of the us/china.

In the case of North Korea, China gets a lot of leverage over Japan and the rest of the world. If you piss China off enough, they won't act like they're going to help your ongoing efforts to prevent North Korea from nuking japan. At least that's what I've heard from a few japanese scholars, take that with a grain of salt, but it does make some sense. Naturally, it's stupid if China is doing that, since China would be in a world of hurt if North Korea actually did start trouble.

I've also heard (although this sounds much more dubious to me) that south korea isn't really doing all they can to stop north korea from getting nukes, since both countries express an interest in eventually reuniting, there's some sense of "If they get nukes, when we reunite, we'll have nukes." Again, that sounds like complete conspiracy theory crap to me, but what do I know?

Personally, I think he's dead. About 4 or 5 months ago, there was a thing in the Japanese news about how Kim Jung Il hasn't been seen and missed all these big celebrations that he's never missed before.The North Koreans denied it and say he's alive, but I'll keep my tinfoil hat on, put my fingers in my ears and say "He's dead, Jim!"

The thing is N. Korea keeps doing stupid shit that annoys the rest of the world, even nations that normally stick up for them like China and Russia are probably rolling their eyes thinking "what do they hope to accomplish?". No global power wants one of their "protected nations" causing problems around the world because inevitably they'd get pulled in as well.

I do agree that N. Korea has been a bigger threat all this time. I think the world has wished Kim Jong Il would eventually just fade away if peopl

This little thing involving a nation called Kuwait, shitloads of oil (lots of wells set ablaze during the Iraqi retreat, as I recall), the global market for petroleum, and the complete and total destabilization of the balance of military power in the Middle East under the influence of a madman come to mind. Just a few factors, of course... daddy Bush should have finished the job the first time. We wouldn't have even had the opportunity to clean up his mess in recent (and ongoing) history if he'd got it righ

You could argue that in gulf war 1, invading Kuwait was a sign of a cancerous government in a region that we really needed to be stable so we could keep getting oil. Not a reason to invade that would have convinced many people, and had that been the express reason, the american public may have been more demanding that we rid our dependence on oil. So that one, maybe.

Gulf war 2? I personally blame extremely short-sighted neocons who got very lucky for getting us started on that again, and national arrogan

China... could cripple the us economy since we buy everything from there today.

That's not even half of the issue. They not only make everything we buy, they lend us the $$$ to buy it. If they stop buying our treasury certs, Obama can kiss his stimulus plan good-bye.

Picture this:You're on your lunch break and pass by a hot-dog vendor. You want a hot dog, but have no $$$. He offers to lend you $2 which you then give back to purchase a dog. You do the same thing the next day and the day after that. This goes on so long that the vendor needs the bizarre relationship to keep his stan

I think your analogy works, but I think it underestimates how much China depends on the United States. If they call in debt, it's a form of mutual destruction, a massive collapse on their end as well as ours. I don't think either party can choose to end the interdependency right now; it can only shift slightly from year to year. Maybe that's a good thing.

U.N. sanctions are typically stuff like "Well, we won't trade with you now until you learn to behave."

The problem is that the people in charge have enough money to get all the stuff they way - cars, booze, food, etc. - smuggled into the country.

If North Korea were an island, things would be easy peezy for a blockade. Set up ships and sink anything we don't want through. But since they have a land border with China, we basically can't do shit.

"Personally, I wish we'd dealt wish North Korea a long, long time ago"

This is indeed wishful thinking, but one must consider many factors that were not present or as pressing in the case of Iraq.

NK is armed to the teeth. Pretty much, every North Korean over 14 has been trained to use an AK 47. Their citizens are indoctrinated at levels perhaps unprecedented in post-WWII history. Not only that but they have actually built a nuclear weapon.Before anyone starts planning for invasion in the North, he has to an

* - hint: out of the three, the one country that stopped developing nuclear weapons got invaded. Two others proceed with nuclear tests and remained safe.

When you cherrypick your examples like that, sure, it does sound crazy not to develop nukes. Of course, why on earth would we have invaded Pakistan, let alone India?!? For that matter, why not throw France on there? Their nukes are probably the reason we haven't invaded them recently.

Meanwhile, Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia... why haven't we invaded them exactly? Is it that they have nukes or they don't have any oil so it's not worth it?

The only thing stopping any country from doing anything is the inevitable retaliation.

You're forgetting that sanity has to apply to that equation as well. Tinpot dictatorships don't have any of that and are more then willing to sacrifice their people as long as the glorious leadership and it's selected people survive.

Actually, that's not true, until now, the best they'd ever done was to launch some missiles into the Japan Sea (more like sputtered into). Which was why Japan was so concerned that this missile would fall on Japan. With this rocket, they wouldn't be able to hit Australia (according to the news reports I've watched), but they could get all the way to the northern part of the Philippines.

If their tests are any indication, no, they don't. Leading up to this, pretty much any news program here in Japan went over the history of North Korea's tests. Outside of two they fell into the water just off the coast of N. Korea and this most recent one, they've all been spectacular disasters.

But if they are really testing ICBM's (i.e. not expecting something to reach orbit) they would be a fool to announce it before hand.

What in the hell are you talking about. The only reason we (or the Russians, or the Chinese, or anybody else for that matter) don't already have troops on the way to take Kim Jong Il's government down right now is because they've been talking shit for the last couple weeks. A surprise launch like this would not go over well with the international community.